When thinking of the literature of World War I, most poets and readers instinctively turn to the soldier poets of that time: Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, among others, and may also glance at some noble noncombatants: Hardy, Yeats, Pound (in parts of “Mauberley”). Apart from a conceivably total lack of interest in war or a hatred of it, poets are not very likely to see wars in “peaceful” times (as if, worldwide, there were any such) as a fit subject for their attention. And yet here comes Salient, a remarkable work of poetry centering on probably the most terrible battle of WWI. It is known as “Third Ypres” (i.e., the third battle of Ypres in the entire war) since it took place in and around the Belgian town of that name, with especial stress on the last ridge east of Ypres: that muddy ocean of corpses, Passchendaele.
The author, Elizabeth Gray, is a woman with a multitude of talents. She has a B.A. with high honors from Radcliffe/Harvard and a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School. She is an expert in complex negotiation and the formation and management of strategic alliances and other forms of interorganizational collaboration (of some utility one imagines in dealing with armies). She has lived and studied extensively in the Middle East and South Asia and has had long familiarity with Asian religions, especially Buddhism. Gray is a poet and a translator from classical Persian with distinguished work on Hafiz-i Shirazi and others of those great singers. More contemporaneously, she has worked with Iranian poets and musicians. To the point here, she is the author of a first book of poetry titled Series|India.
The latter collection is a very impressive and consistent work with its mixture of India herself, spirituality, and the personal. The entry through the Great Mother, the “Vulva of the Ten Worlds,” into the savage beauty and immemorial violence of the subcontinent; the hard path to reaching and to recognizing India; the extensive work of becoming India (which is what the quest relates)—all of this travels in the head of anyone who has known and loved India and been set fire to, over and beyond its oceanic poverties, by its shattering beauty. Gray has a great gift of precision; every word tells (“a braid of words”) and there are no weaknesses: the cloth (India is the great queen of the textile arts) is of one measure and of one piece:
But there must she thought, why we’re, why
we seek the blue-milk sea, the crags of the mighty Vindhyas,
the Tower of the Ten Winds, the thread offered
that we can decline or use.
A great command of vocabulary; an uninterruptedly assured control of space on the page; a whole series of shortcuts to veracity (“Whether we are early or beauty,” “Yes, absolutely you are from where,” “We’re going to myth her”); a masterly management of formidable myth; a constant tendency toward prose (a potential novel hides in the background) without ever departing from poetry . . . and now, in not dissimilar terms, we reach Salient, a poem about a legendary WWI battle between Brits and Germans whose locus has earned it the title of “the Immortal Salient.”
Throughout Gray’s book, one is never at any remove from the facts and figures of the soldier’s life, and one acquires, without huge technical headaches, a pertinent notion of the documentation. For example, one extraordinary work that Gray relies on is the vast Artillery’s Astrologers, a 558-page “History of British Survey and Mapping on the Western Front 1914–1918” by Peter Chasseaud. A great deal of the closeness one develops to the individual combatants, to their movements on the ground, and to the groups into which they are divided, arises from Gray’s disciplined and restrained use of this massive material. I’m reminded of sources for my own work in Avia, with sortie by sortie, battle by battle detail found, for instance, in the now classic works from a number of nations on the Battle of Britain in a subsequent war.
The achievement of Salient that strikes me first is the way collage succeeds every time, by its subtlety, its revelatory success while maintaining a profound simplicity. Gray has a sure hand in making poetry out of the most basic prose there can be: often the prose of military orders and reports. There is a constant occurrence of impromptu beauty, such as “color coming into the world”; “Eliminate those portions of this evidence which are obviously song”; the last lines of “Preliminary Orders,” “as the flares and star shells do, / advance as light”; or the two-line poem, “This amulet protects the wearer against disappearing. // I place it in your hair.” Everything invoked is crystal clear and yet retains its crystal mystery. There is a magical accession to the delineation of links and relationships that develop in the poem, even physical connections (real or imaginary) when moving from soldier to soldier, woman to soldier, poet to soldier, woman/poet to lover. There is a burning presence of absence, a constant coming and going between presence and absence: mainly the stress on the thousands of missing soldiers all the way through the poem until they achieve some kind of resurrection:
Some became smoke, cloud, and rain:
as when a pot breaks
the space within and the space without
become intermingled
the body reduced
to its atomic constituents indistinguishable
from the awareness within
Others dissolved into light from their feet upwards:
the heavy shelling at D.6.d.4.5
west of what remained of the church
for example
and after the light
faded from the sky there were no bodies
There is a constant struggle for vision: for seeing the war when so far from it: this is part of an ongoing conversation all through the work between visibility and occultation. Gray’s use of quotes is vital to the poem, like this epigraph by Mark Larabee from his Front Lines of Modernism: “The continuing alteration of the ground makes it difficult to reconcile a vision of terrain at one point in time with its appearance in another. . . . This is not to say that under these circumstances one does not keep trying to see.” And there is a full control of the arrival into the poem of the author, beginning physically early on with “Here I am straddling the Franco-Belgian frontier” and reaching full deployment in, say, “Where I stood watch, at your flank, alert, / behind the warm berm of your rib.” While in “The Obstacle,” the poet becomes most fully the soldier:
Then some kind of flare hovering
illuminating the daylight, filling the hollowed ground, then
implacable endurance, the residual
stubbornly held on to, history
again material, catching
at my clothes—some kind of affirmation—
until there it is, all of it—spider wire, snarls
of concertina, knife rests, chevaux-de-frise,
until the thing itself—as seen here
The “she,” or “female,” figure in the poem, when not the poet herself, appears to be a recurring Tantric Buddhist deity. For Elizabeth can become the deity and the deity can become Elizabeth: this is the formidable value of the occulted vestment in which the work is clothed. At the outset, we must face the deployment of Buddhist Tantra as a co-primary subject, as a repellent of the enemy (the German army in this case) throughout the book to the very last passages. As to the profundity of what it is that repels and that is repelled, virtually not a word about who, or indeed, what is doing that. Tantra is a vast realm: the part of it invoked here is primarily feminine and develops the activity of female deities. These deities can be terrible in the toils of this immense and terrifying war; they can also function as maternal consolers and transformers of the terror and give meaning to what appears totally meaningless. The immense pardon granted by and inherent in the visualizations of the maternal deities: to experience this in the poem is to come naturally and simply upon the learning of an answer—after centuries of the passing of such a multitude of lives. Insofar as the Buddhist intention in almost any and all its chapters is to teach, Salient has a message, however subtly and deeply, almost invisibly, it is buried.
A poem as visionary and advisory as Salient in its return to a reality, whatever time it belongs to, is what we look for in a work, knowing that in the annals of worldwide suffering there is never truly any peace at all. Here collage, as a massively omnipotent tactic, serves as background, departs . . . and poetry reenters: poetry as the rarest of totalities. Yet it is able to leave room for the question of whether the work has or has not a start and a finish, whether it is timed or timeless, whether it is, or is not, an ongoing miraculous dialogue—again between presence and absence.
For Salient we are deeply in debt to Elizabeth Gray.
—Nathaniel Tarn